Mark Pincus Blog

US govt deal making is a race to the bottom

Its been painful to watch our democrat led govt turn into a free money feeding frenzy.

Todays nytimes reports that in order to pass the climate change bill lawmakers doled out billions in gifts to each other and special interests from agriculture, forestry and even oil.

It says "the deal making continued up untill the final moments with rep waxman doling out billions on the house floor to secure final votes.'

The story notes that a freshman lawmaker from florida got $50 million for a hurricane research center.

Rep bobby rush of illinois withheld support until a last minute deal got his state $1 billion for jobs and energy efficient public housing. Does anyone question whether the energy saved will equal the $1 billion we're providing?

Even texas oil refineries got 'relief' with nearly $3 billion annually to help with added costs.

Rahm emanuel's quote says the president 'loves the bill...including the great, the good and the not so great provisions.'

As I've said before, we are reliving the lyndon johnson years of guns and butter. The only difference is the magnitude of spending.

What happens when you have a country with less than half its voters paying any taxes and a small % paying the majority?

For the minority footing greater bills there is a disincentive to generate income. For the vast majority there is a race to the bottom. Get while the getting's good.

In other nytimes news...the governor of south carolina says he will repay public funds used to visit his mistress in argentina which he rationalizes because 'it was a real love story'. And Al franken wins the supreme court decision giving the dems a filibuster proof senate majority.

God help us all:)

Zynga customer support - catching up

I'm happy to report that zynga is now handling all cs tix within 72 hrs. Our team has worked hard to keep up with the growth in our game userbase. Zynga now has nearly 200 cs reps across 3 continents responding to our customers.

If you have an outstanding issue that remains unresolved pls resubmit to our cs.

Who's managing our money?

The govt running gm is like wolves tending the sheep herd. Great npr piece on all the ways congressmen are interfering with gm mgt's efforts to reduce costs.

Zynga players

Zynga has recently banned many players across its games for bad actions like chip hacking and selling.

If you believe you have been unfairly banned pls email chris hinton, chrish@zynga.com with a link to your profile. Zynga will verify your account and reinstate if deserved.

Dealing with with game hackers

Zynga has taken some massive actions this week to protect our users from in game hackers.

if you feel you have been wrongly banned from our games go to our customer support and they will verify your account status.

We have massively scaled our customer support to well over 100 full time reps to help deal with this.

You can also post to this blog and I will do my best to respond.

I'm sorry for any trouble anyone has had. We strive to offer a fun, safe environment for you to play with your friends and (nice) other people:)

Web 3 - the whole world will be a game

All web services will eventually look and feel like games. Users will gravitate to the 'funnest' ecommerce or other sites. Game mex will be the most valuable skillset for web content and commerce.

Iphone app to help me interview

Why isn't there an app that tells me question types for various positions and then let's me benchmark answers in relative and absolute terms?

It could propose simple to hard verbal math problems for engineers and biz people to test problem solving. It could let me time responses.

Web 3.0 snippets - I

We have entered the third business plan of the web.

Web 1.0 was about aggregating online audiences. The currency was eye balls measured in page views. This business was banner ads and ecommerce.

Web 2.0 was the search economy which enabled many more businesses to participate through sem and seo. The currency was clicks and while it was higher margin, most of that went to the search companies, primarily goog.

Web 3.0 is about monetizing this massive web audience through users paying for mostly digital goods and services. The product will be a service or at least ongoing relationship. Distribution could be through Apps or even daily emails. The currency will be DAUs (daily active users). This will be higher margin and fuel an exponentially greater number of companies.

Web 3.0 businesses may range from games and virtual goods (like zynga) to private sales like my wife's www.onekingslane.com/join . It will spawn many new online industries with creative entrepreneurs constantly testing what digital goods and services users will be willing to pay for.

Web 3.0 businesses will be measured in $$/pixel/minute. This is a throw back to hsn and qvc. These home shopping services proliferated because they could better monetize local cable screen time which couldn't be sold as it wasn't measurable.

Web 3.0 services will be ttly metric driven. The best will combine intuition and data to rapidly iterate and drive reach, retention and revenue.

Major distribution platforms from social nets like fb and myspace to portals like yhoo and goog should all be massive beneficiaries. Key will be their ability to attract entrepreneurs and enable them to effectively test their services.

If TCI has been able to do this with its channel space all of cable would be far more valuable and relevant today.

Msg to big media -- open api your assets. Invite the world to harvest your land.

Fw: My Supreme Court nominee

Obama is using brilliant web marketing post campaign to keep taking his msg direct to the people. Feels like the days of web based democracy are getting closer by the email.

Love this. Go obama!

________________________________ From: President Barack Obama To: Mark Pincus Sent: Tue May 26 14:11:17 2009 Subject: My Supreme Court nominee

Mark --

I am proud to announce my nominee for the next Justice of the United States Supreme Court: Judge Sonia Sotomayor.

This decision affects us all -- and so it must involve us all. I've recorded a special message to personally introduce Judge Sotomayor and explain why I'm so confident she will make an excellent Justice.

Please watch the video, and then pass this note on to friends and family to include them in this historic moment.

[http://my.barackobama.com/page/-/sotomayor_email_video_graphic2.jpg]

Judge Sotomayor has lived the America Dream. Born and raised in a South Bronx housing project, she distinguished herself in academia and then as a hard-charging New York District Attorney.

Judge Sotomayor has gone on to earn bipartisan acclaim as one of America's finest legal minds. As a Supreme Court Justice, she would bring more federal judicial experience to the Supreme Court than any Justice in 100 years. Judge Sotomayor would show fidelity to our Constitution and draw on a common-sense understanding of how the law affects our day-to-day lives.

A nomination for a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land is one of the most important decisions a President can make. And the discussions that follow will be among the most important we have as a nation. You can begin the conversation today by watching this special message and then passing it on:

http://my.barackobama.com/SupremeCourt

Thank you,

President Barack Obama

Paid for and authorized by the Democratic National Committee, www.democrats.org. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Democratic National Committee, 430 S. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC 20003

Contributions or gifts to the Democratic National Committee are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.

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One happy user!

Compute: Back up ... Zynga update ... data recovery ... more

Submitted by SHNS on Tue, 05/12/2009 - 16:46.

• By JAMES DERK, Scripps Howard News Service
• Science and Tech

Q. What happened with Zynga? Don't leave us hanging!

A. Regular readers will note that I recently gently urged Zynga, a game manufacturer on such platforms as Facebook and MySpace, to improve their customer support and technical support. I received a sincere apology from Mark Pincus, CEO of Zynga, and shared a conference call with its management team, offering some suggestions on how I'd improve things. I enjoyed talking with the team and really believe they are trying to improve things. I will keep in touch with them and pass along your comments in aggregate to them.

They also promised some cool improvements to "Mafia Wars" (and gave me back my "Defense!")

Iphone games can fill our nooks and crannies of useless minutes

A lot of people say they don't have time for games. I think they really mean they are too busy at work to play games.

Iphones have the potential to let us fill our nooks and crannies of time. These are minutes wasted in lines, taxis, airports and boring meetings and conf calls that we could be playing with friends.

Yo supports sf spca

Proud that zynga's yoville community raised $20k for the sf spca selling spca branded dogs.

zynga is searching for world class product managers

if you have great experience either in software product management or a super analytical position at a top i-bank or consulting firm pls send us your resume. www.zynga.com

pleasing all 45 million customers all the time

I ran across a blog this week that I wanted to comment on. In it, James Derk, a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, detailed some negative experiences he had with Zynga customer service ( http://tinyurl.com/cudmlp).   I want to thank james for sharing his thoughts and apologize for the furstrating experience he had with us. 

The article highlighted one of the toughest challenges we face as a company -- keeping pace with the growth in our community.  We’ve grown from 1M to nearly 10M daily active users in just 9 months and we’ve have had to scale our customer service systems in real time. 

We’re definitely experiencing some growing pains, but behind the scenes we’re working hard to align our organization behind customer needs.  In the last quarter we’ve brought our average response time down to less than 4 days for all but the toughest problems (hacking and cheating tickets take longer to research and resolve), we launched our knowledge base ( http://tinyurl.com/co5kak) and user forums (http://tinyurl.com/cpj3u2z). The response has been very positive.

i believe that the idea of a free web service offering live customer support is pretty new. if any of you see other best of breed approaches that you think are better we would love to hear about them.

Zynga’s mission is to connect the world through games and in order to do that, we need wildly happy customers. We’re working around the clock .  We welcome your feedback!

Proud and ashamed

I'm proud to read today that obama had the courage and strength of leadership to force the disclosure of america's recent torture of suspected terrorists.

At the same time I'm ashamed to be a citizen of a country that would institutionalize torture.

Starting in 2002 I blogged my disgust for this and utter shock that our country actually had a *debate* about whether this was ok. Are you fucking kidding? imagine 1933 germany *debating* whether there were circumstances that justified genocide.

As much as I disagree with obama's economic policies, I respect his desire to raise our country back up, to regain our moral backbone.

Zynga network outage today

Dear faithful zynga game players,

We are experiencing a severe outage today. My understanding is that someone sabotaged att's network by cutting fiber circuits.

I'm sorry for any service outages anyone faces.

Yoville problems

We have gotten complaints from users who can't login to yoville and get a blank screen. Pls email chrish@zynga.com. Sorry for your problems.

Zynga customer service

Some people have posted complaints to this blog about problems with zynga games and customer support. Zynga has 30 people in cs supporting 8.5 million daily users with a goal of 48 hour response time.

We have recently been fighting hackers in our yoville game and are working hard to help people who have lost items or currency.

if you're a zynga user and don't get a response in 48 hrs pls email us again. We will resolve all issues as soon as possible.